Incremental forever backup strategy
IBM Storage® Protect Plus provides a backup strategy called incremental forever. Rather than scheduling periodic full backup jobs, this backup solution requires only one initial full backup to the vSnap server. Afterward, an ongoing sequence of incremental backup jobs occurs.
All subsequent backup jobs back up only new or changed data from the selected resources. The backups are then reconstructed at each point in time that a backup is performed, making it possible to recover data from any single backup point.
The incremental forever backup solution provides the following advantages:
- Reduces the amount of data that goes across the network
- Reduces data growth because all incremental backups contain only the blocks that changed since the previous backup
- Reduces the duration of backup jobs
The IBM Storage Protect Plus incremental forever backup process creates a snapshot of selected resources. The resources that are backed up depends on the agent type.
- Virtualized systems
- You can back up resource data for the following virtualized systems.
- VMware vCenter server instances
- Back up resources such as virtual machines (VMs), datastores, folders, vApps, and datacenters. For more information about VMware backup operations, see Backing up VMware data.
- Microsoft™ Hyper-V server instances
- Back up resources such as VMs, virtual hard disks (VHDX), and VHDX files. For more information about Hyper-V backup operations, see Backing up Hyper-V data.
- File systems
- You can back up the directories and files that are associated with physical and virtualized Windows™ file system servers. For more information about Windows file system backup operations, see Windows file systems
- Databases
- You can back up database files for the following databases. You can also backup the database
logs for some databases, which enables you to select point-in-time restore options and recovery
options when you create a restore job.
- Db2®
- For more information about Db2 backup operations, see Backing up Db2 data.
- Oracle
- For more information about Oracle backup operations, see Backing up Oracle data.
- MongoDB
- For more information about MongoDB operations, see MongoDB.
- Microsoft Exchange Server
- For more information about Exchange Server backup operations, see Backing up Exchange databases.
- Microsoft SQL Server
- For more information about SQL Server backup operations, see Backing up SQL Server data.
- SAP HANA
- For more information about SAP HANA operations, see SAP HANA.
Backup for Amazon EC2
Incremental forever backup operations are not used for Amazon EC2. The backup strategy for these
resources is dependent on the resource type.
- Amazon EC2 instances
- For information about the backup configuration for Amazon EC2 instances, see Backing up and restoring Amazon EC2 data.